I’m so happy I made this, and it wasn’t total crap!

She has a full video of the making of, which certainly gave me an idea of how she made it, this is only a minimal part of what it takes to make a replica, however.

Unlike her, I’ve never painted with Acrylics before, and this one has a lot of it, specially in the hair, I went full watercolor on my version, and you can actually see the big difference.

I’m the first to admit that my version looks simple and unfinished, but I think it looks really close to the actual colors in person.

It was my first time using a 22″x30″ paper, which has it’s cons and pros, It’s harder to maintain proportions while making an undersketch to begin painting, but really allows you to fine tune those details, specially in the eyes. (did you notice Agnes didn’t paint eyelashes?)

After the skin, the dress was all black so it was no big issue.

Hair has always been my nemesis, and this time wasn’t the exception. for this section the real struggle was mixing the right colors in the right value… and on top of that I had to be careful not to paint on the highlight zones, or near the hair strands: this caused the final painting to lack a natural feel on the strokes of the hair.

with acrylics I would have been able to paint over other strands and get the right mix every stroke.

Like most of my paintings, it started out as an experiment on which I kept adding to, until I really really liked it… however this time, I never did.

This making of is to show just why I didn’t like this piece on its original form.

Although I didn’t nail her factions completely I think this piece turned out beautiful at the end. That said, lets get technical.

Painting the face was a combination of Ultramarine Blue and Chinese White to lightening it out, and then a bit of Brilliant Red to blush her.

Hair was another deal, I used Ultramarine again but added Orange to dull the color, then Black, the result was this Greenish Black that I really disliked, since it had nothing to do with the color I intended to create.

At that point I still had to paint the ears and other details, but seeing that awful green was too much, and it hit me hard, I was demotivated enough to leave it for that day.

Next day I decided to go in a radical way and finish this one… Digitally

Below you can see clearly whats editted, and what is not.

The one on the left is absolutely unfinished, when I stopped for being demotivated by that greenish tone on her hair, I didn’t even go trought the process of pencil coloring details, adding blacks and whites, nothing, it felt like a waste of time.

Instead I started to mess around it with photoshop, to see what went wrong, and ended up fixing this one to make it look more like in was in my mind.

I used Kyle’s Watercolor Brushes that I got a while ago, and the worked super well, with a pen tablet.

Don’t forget that you could still get a print of this piece here, It will give me means to continue doing what I love, and will be forever thankful!.

This experiment didn’t end here actually, I went ahead and finished another painting using the same color palette but correcting my mistakes, and this time I didn’t had to go into photoshop to fix anything.